The Jordan Harbinger Show - 533: Tristan Harris | Reclaiming Our Future with Humane Technology

Episode Date: July 13, 2021

Tristan Harris (@tristanharris) is a former Google design ethicist, primary subject of the acclaimed Netflix documentary The Social Dilemma, co-founder of the Center for Humane Technology, and co-host of the podcast Your Undivided Attention. What We Discuss with Tristan Harris: Why we're worth more to social engagement platforms as manipulatable slabs of predictable human behavior than as free-thinking individuals. How the social networks of the early 2000s so quickly turned from places where we could keep in touch with friends, family, and colleagues into disinformation amplifiers that contribute to the destabilization of democracies. Why your algorithm-tailored online experience so radically differs from that of your closest friends and loved ones, and why this is a problem when the public good is cast aside in the interest of keeping us engaged and enraged. The unintended consequences of allowing an algorithm to bring people together by what it sees as similar interests, and how this has thrown fuel on the disinformation fire. How attempting to outthink a social media algorithm is like trying to play chess against a computer that can look ahead and counter every move you could possibly make. And much more... Full show notes and resources can be found here: jordanharbinger.com/533 Sign up for Six-Minute Networking -- our free networking and relationship development mini course -- at jordanharbinger.com/course! Like this show? Please leave us a review here -- even one sentence helps! Consider including your Twitter handle so we can thank you personally!See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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Today on the show, Tristan Harris, host of the Center for Humane Technologies podcast to your undivided attention. You've probably seen him on Netflix. The Social Dilemma was that documentary that he made there. We're supposed to do this interview like a year ago, but here we are. He's a former Google design and technology ethicist. He studies

cults, mind control, a man after my own tastes, of course, used to study some magic as a kid and studied with BJ Fogg, who was also on this show, episode 306. Magic habits and cults, great primer on human behavior here. Today, we're talking about apps and social media, how they're out to have people skyrocket to fame because it gives us those dopamine hits. But is this good for our information ecosystem? No, obviously. We spend billions on border security, but our cyber borders are wide Why spend on bombs when you can ignite a culture war domestically? The myth is that technology is neutral, and it's all about how you use it. Design has evolved such that you have less and less choice about how to use technology,

because interaction is predetermined in many ways. So we think we have free choice, but we forget that somebody else is controlling the menu of choices. This didn't exist before at a stage that could beat our own brain and out-compete pretty much everything else for our attention. Thus, nowadays, we have no common language with many. This is why we see stuff like QAnon and we think, wow, this is as crazy as it gets. It's less crazy when you see the absolute firehose of misinformation and disinformation that these people are drinking from. Don't get me wrong, it's still crazy.

But you start to see how this stuff begins to creep in and surround those folks, and you often can't help but get sucked into it yourself, especially because people look to confirm new beliefs by searching out new beliefs by searching out new evidence by searching out new evidence. for those beliefs as well. So we're going to go over a lot of social media, what it's doing to our society, and more. George Orwell, who wrote 1984, thought that in the future, we just wouldn't be able to get any information, and we wouldn't be able to get the truth. And of course, I think it was all this Huxley who turned out to be right, who said he was actually afraid that information and truth would simply be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. And that is exactly what happened. That's what's happening right now. I've also got a lot of thoughts and additional information about this topic in the show close. So make sure you stay tuned.

after the show. And if you're wondering how I managed to book all these amazing guests, I use software systems and tiny habits, and I'm teaching you how to do that same thing for free in our six-minute networking course. Again, no payment required. And you can find that course at Jordan Harbinger.com slash course. By the way, most of the guests on our show, subscribe to the course, contribute to the course. Come join us. You'll be in smart company where you belong. Now, here's Tristan Harris. How many people have watched the social dilemma? I feel like everyone saw that. Do you have any idea, the stats on this now? I think we estimate. that about 100 million people saw the film is like a baseline estimate based on the numbers that

we saw. I think 38 million households saw it in the first four weeks alone. And that was household. So that's not individuals. And based on the traffic that we saw, we estimate more than about 100 million people saw the film. And that's probably still an old number. That's in about 190 countries and 30 languages. So it's definitely, and I think it broke all records on Netflix. Maybe like the number two most popular documentary on Netflix in its history, I think. Congrats on that. I mean, it seems like that is the beginning of the antidote a little bit. So a lot of the people in the film, they help build Facebook, and now you and them are, is it a little bit Dr. Frankenstein-esque, right, killing the creation?

Because I know you worked at Google, and I know the other folks in the film works on Facebook and in other elements of social media, but the whole thing has gotten wildly out of control. Well, I think the word you use first is correct, which is that it's kind of a Frankenstein. I think the point of the social dilemma, there isn't some easy set of fixes. that Mark Zuckerberg can just go in there and tweak it and then suddenly, hey, we have Facebook as this positive force in society. It's basically run amok and is out of the control of the creators. But the people who are in the film are insiders, Justin Rosenstein, who had been at the like button, Tim Kendall, who brought the business model and monetization model to Facebook, and was also the president

of Pinterest, Roger McNamee, who was former a mentor of Mark Zuckerberg when he first started the company. These are all people who came forward because they understand the risks. that are being created in society by this sort of out-of-control machine are far-out gray, whatever benefits that people can certainly point to in their lives that can come from it, you have to ask, you know, in the film, actually, I think I say, the thing that's so challenging about this moment of evaluating technology's impact in society is it's confusing because it's simultaneous utopia and dystopia. We have some of the most amazing capacities and, you know, things that we could possibly ever celebrate, you know, the fact that just about every bit of

information that you would ever want to be able to have access to is basically available, and that's incredible. And YouTube could be the world's library of Alexandria and educating people and creating all this positive impact in the world. But the net set of harms and risks that are sewn into the fabric of society by not just Facebook or social media, but the entirety of the engagement platform. So like YouTube is an engagement platform, TikTok is an engagement platform, Snapchat is an engagement platform because what they have in common is predating on human behavior and human attention as a commodity. So in other words, we're worth more when we're the product as dead slabs of human behavior than we are as free-thinking individuals who are living our lives.

And so long as that's true, that's kind of the double bind that the companies are in. But I think I'm a bit off track from the question that you asked originally. No, it's all good because we're definitely going to get into that, like how we get monetized and things like that. You've been sounding the alarm on the social media. And especially like filter bubble stuff, which we'll talk about in a second since like, I don't know, 2013, I feel like is some of the first stuff that I found from you. How did things go from, oh, this will be a great way for friends and family to stay connected to like dot, dot, dot, genocide in Myanmar?

Yeah. It's a long complicated history. But you don't need to give the whole history, but like just kind of, I guess we're kind of confirming that that's the direction we went. Because it seemed almost overnight. I remember having Facebook in college or at the end of college. Yeah. And I was like, oh, cool.

I can see what your friends look like or what people we have in common or like what girls I want to meet from your friend circle. That's like what it was for and they parody that in the movie. And then you know now as an adult who doesn't really use Facebook at all,

I'm like, how are people in other countries killing each other over misinformation? And then I look at what's going on in the United States and I'm like, holy shit. I mean, this is a short, it's a shorter path than I think most of us expected if we expected this at all.

So I guess what I hear you asking is so how do we get from this sort of 2004, 2005, 2006 version of Facebook where it's a place for people in college to see what are the hot girls and boys in their classes that they want to know more about in stock online to how is it destabilizing democracies around the world, making it impossible to know what's true, probably inhibiting our progress on climate change and driving genocides and developing countries with high social fragility. How did that change happen? So there's a sequence of changes to the design of the product, which I want to say, I think from the very beginning, there was problems

with what Facebook was. I mean, so from the very beginning, I think they knew that they were manipulating certain human weaknesses. And the simplest example of this I can point to, you go back to 2004, 2005, they invent the photo tagging feature. Were you in college when Facebook came about? I was probably, yeah, I was an undergrad, and I feel like that, and it was only available to a handful of schools. And it was called the Facebook. Now it's just Facebook. Right. Infamously, they dropped the, the, yeah. I remember that too. So I was at Stanford at the time, and Stanford was, I think, the third school that got Facebook.

And I remember the day that they rolled out the photo tagging feature. Because what was brilliant about that feature wasn't that you could just sort of link all these photos of your friends that you were taking while you were on campus at events and have your face visible online. Is it as an engine for Facebook, what it meant is that every single day or every other day you had a email come in saying, hey, you've been tagged in a photo. by your friend Jordan. And that is one of the most persuasive things you can throw in front of the nervous system of a human social primate. Because essentially in one moment, my social validation and approval is on the line. I know that you, Jordan, tagged me in a photo. So I'm wondering, like, what photo is it that you tagged of me?

And you did it. So I want to know, well, then all the people that you know are going to see that that happened. And so how do I make sure that that's an okay? And how do I look and all that? So we kind of drop everything and we open that up. Now, if I'm in Facebook, I just found a psychological cocktail that's basically like gets past your entire defenses because you are going to stop what you are doing, your homework, your reading, and you are going to open that email right now.

And you could ask, as Jeff Seibert says in the film, The Social Dilemma, why don't they just show you the photo in the email? It'd be a lot easier to see it without actually opening up Facebook. But that simple feature is basically just a manipulative tactic to keep, I think of this is like a robotic puppet show. You have a puppet master where it's not even a human being of Zuckerberg. It's a machine that figures out how do we basically keep people coming back and manipulating people, you know, their behavior over and over again?

Well, let's invent a feature that not only makes it easy for you, Jordan, to tag me in a photo, but actually what if Facebook highlighted Jordan's friends in the photos he's already taken and said, hey, this is Tristan's face. Do you want to tag Tristan in this photo? So now they're actually manipulating you into even tagging me. and then when I get the email, it doesn't say, hey, do you want to respond to Jordan being manipulated by Facebook to tag me in this photo? Instead, it says, hey, Jordan tagged you in this photo. And again, this is the kind of puppet master you don't see behind the curtain.

This is the machine that was from the very beginning, to go back to your original question, was manipulating human weaknesses for the purposes of driving growth and engagement. And it worked. I mean, it kept all these college students from basically doing anything productive and getting sucked into going back into Facebook and then getting sucked into the photo slideshow. and then even there you have another sort of manipulative technique, right? So there you are with the photo slideshow in the early days. And you would hit space bar and it would show you the next photo. See, it's space bar, space bar, space bar, so you're turning to a little rat, right? You don't know what's going to come next. It's like a slot machine. Your hand never has to leave its resting position. I don't know if you know the history of slot machines, but one of the big innovations that used to

actually put your hand on a lever and then pull down the lever to actually get the slots going. You notice if you go to Vegas now, you don't have to do that. Your hand sits on a little steady resting position and you just hit with your finger and you basically can just, just, you can just, repeatedly get the slot machine going. And that's the kind of thing. It's like, imagine a world where your whole computer is just a slot machine. And you think you're, you know, sitting there doing something productive, checking your friends' photos on Facebook, but you're being turned into a rat that's part of a psychological experiment. So that wasn't causing a genocide in Myanmar, but that was the preconditions for how do we manipulate human weaknesses to drive up the thing that we want to happen. There's a lot of

other decisions along the way. I mean, the other one was personalization of news. So before the Facebook newsfeed, you had to click around Facebook quite a lot to kind of stock the cute girls on campus. And then they invented this feature called News Feed, which would basically just show you, here is basically a list of all the changes that have occurred throughout Facebook. And then that was a more efficient way for you to basically see everything. But to do that, they needed to personalize information to you. So instead of people all seeing kind of some global news feed, if here's what's popular, it would say, well, what are the things that would be most likely to keep you coming back?

And so of the 2,000 things they could show you, they select, 20 based on the patterns that you always click on puppy videos or this other person always clicks on surfboard videos or this other person always clicks on plane crashes, you know, or QAnon or something like that. And it just says, oh, we're going to give you more like that. And that personalization drove up what we call the rabbit holes and the filter bubbles that we're now in. And that had this effect of reinforcing some of our existing biases and worldviews. Then that set of incentives was able to be manipulated by political actors who could basically realize they would get more attention, the more they showed you in for.

about why the other side, sort of negative campaigning, like why you should hate the other, your tribal outgroup identity, the people who are not like you. And you would get clicks infinitely on a treadmill if you did that. So over time, this just kept going and going and going and going, and then that's how you get to kind of the situation today. And social media, so this filter bubble has made it so that everyone essentially lives in their own reality, right? I mean, most people are not seeing the same information because of how that algorithm works with the feed. And I'm wondering, is this why when, like the other day, I picked up my wife's phone and I looked at the app she had open. I can't remember what it was. I think it was Pinterest and I don't even

normally. It's something like that. I don't use any social media now other than looking at my Instagram DMs, but it was something along those lines. And I remember thinking, this isn't interesting at all. And she routinely will comment on whatever I would be looking at and she's like, oh, this isn't interesting. You know, what is this or what is that? And it made me realize that our information is so tailored to us personally that it just doesn't even work when you're looking at someone else's, like if I, if you're watching CNN, I might look at it and go, oh, what's this? But if I'm looking, if you're looking at your phone, there's almost nothing on there that I would go, oh, this is interesting to me also. What is that? Because it's so hyper-personalized.

Well, I mean, there's a lot of different factors at play here. When you go to the gym and you exercise a new set of muscles that you haven't exercised before, so let's say you're trying to learn something new, go start learning chemistry from scratch. Like, how does that feel to a human nervous system that's jumping into some brand new topic that hasn't been resonating for it before. The reward circuits are not really there. And so we more easily stay with things that we get a quick hit reward circuit. And that's one of the phenomena that's going on there. The other thing here is you realize that when you are scrolling a news feed, you have a supercomputer that's pointed at your brain that's reverse engineering and has seen literally a trillion patterns of

what worked on all these other human animals that are sitting in front of the same Skinner box. and it's just known that like, okay, if you're the kind of person who's clicked on surfer videos before, do you think Facebook with its 3 billion users hasn't seen like a million people just like you who click on surf videos all day long? It knows what you look like. And it knows that there's other people that within that group, it's not just surfer videos, there's other things. There's like certain photos of certain kinds of lifestyles that tend to work well at keeping your attention. There's maybe workout equipment or I don't know exactly what the things would be, but it knows the surrounding constellation of media that would work well for that group. So I'll give you an example

in the world that we're facing now in the COVID pandemic. So, you know, Facebook is only looking for these associations that would keep people engaged. And one of the things they built in 2018 was when they changed their mission statement from let's make the world more open and connected, if you remember they changed their mission statement to let's bring the world closer together with Facebook groups. Do you remember this change happening? Sort of, yeah. I remember the push for groups. it was like more sort of almost like hobby based. I don't necessarily remember that, but I do remember the sort of the shift going from look at your stuff to look at stuff together vaguely. Yeah, there's actually a few different reasons for that. One of them is that people stopped posting

as much, individuals stopped posting as much about their lives. And so if you're trying to backfill your content funnels where you need to like get people to still come back to the trough to keep eating garbage. So instead of eating other people's garbage, well, what if we could basically backfill it with basically Facebook groups content because that's a way of keeping people, groups have way more content flowing through them than the likelihood that you and I as an individual are going to post. If you and I burn out from Facebook, there's always like some group that's like an interesting group that's going to be posting content more often. So they started elevating groups in the newsfeed. And one of the things that they did to drive up groups behavior was they actually recommended

more groups for people to join. So on the right hand sidebar, it would say here's other groups you might like. So if you were a new mom, Reni DiResta, my colleague who studies disinformation, was a new mom, and she joined one group called the Do It Yourself Baby Food Group, like organic baby food that, you know, you can make yourself. And that's a perfectly fine use case. But again, this supercomputer pointed at your brain says, okay, well, what do people who tend to click on do it yourself baby food, organic baby food groups? What do they tend to like? And what are the Facebook groups that tend to be really engaging for those kinds of users? Can you guess what the number one? recommendation was? Yeah, so I'm cheating because Renee's been on the show, but that's how she

stumbled across the anti-vax. So yeah, do-it-yourself baby food has mothers that don't want to buy stuff because they can make it themselves or people obsessed with health. And it's like, oh, you like health? Try this thing that is complete bullshit that is absolutely terrible for you, but also seems health-related. In other words, conspiracy theories about vaccines. And this is, by the way, I think in 2015 or so. So this is far before we were questioning, okay, what's the safety of of MRNA vaccines for COVID and know we've done the safety analysis that's appropriate for a brand new vaccine, for a brand new disease, what are the long-term effects of doing spike protein? This is not that kind of thing, just to be really clear for listeners.

So before we get into some polarized debate about the COVID vaccine. The COVID vaccine. Yeah. Let's go back to 2015 and say for all vaccines, like for people who are just to be skeptical of all vaccines, here's a bunch of moms who joined this one group. And then it says, hey, by the way, here's a thousand people just like you who also loved this anti-vaccines or moms against vaccines group. And as a new mom, you're like kind of curious.

I've kind of heard about that, you know, and I have a new kid. And the last thing I want to do is plunge a needle into their arm of my, you know, little baby and feel like I'm endangering their life. So maybe I should join that group. So it's very persuasive. And again, Facebook is essentially identifying. It's an automated machine that is like a robotic puppet master just figuring out what is that persuasive thing to our nervous system. And it just finds out that moms against vaccines is just really persuasive.

But it caused millions of moms to join those groups. So before, again, we question, we have a separate conversation about, okay, are vaccines safe? what's the vaccine schedule between the U.S. versus in Denmark is doing 70 vaccines before the age of two, safe and healthy versus doing, you know, a few and then slowing down the vaccine schedule. We can have that conversation, but that's very different than are we recommending millions of new moms to go into this anti-vaccine rabbit hole? And that's exactly what Facebook did through the effort of supposedly trying to bring the world closer together when it changed its mission statement and focusing on groups over individual users. And so over and over again, this is a good example of the

Frankenstein, right? They're making a change. they're making a tweak to how this automated puppet master is sort of roping each of us into these different things, whether it's me responding to that photo tag of you or a Facebook group that was persuasive. But each time they do that, it sounds like a good idea to recommend other groups you might like, because if it's like a surfing club and then now you have like a boogieboarding club that's like another group I could join, that sounds like a pretty fine thing to recommend to someone. But across the board, it started recommending more conspiracy theory groups to people. And so Renee talks about how once you started with the first anti-vaccine group, it would

join, it would then recommend flat earth and chem trails. And then later, there's a Q&ON sort of contingent. And it just kept going and going and going. And then you roll back the tape and say, over the last 10 years, why does society look so crazy? Well, as Facebook and Twitter and YouTube, which all had these similar effects, by the way, have become the predominant way that we construct reality and know, like, what is true, what's going on in the world?

What do we care about? Well, especially in a COVID world where we're looking all through, where we're staring at home through the binoculars of social media to construct an image of the world. I mean, I was talking to a friend just a few days ago who's spending time in Portland. And she said to me, oh, my God, it's like the most amazing, beautiful city. It's like, oh, that's funny because in my mind, all I've seen over the last year of Portland is like war zones and, like, fighting and rubber bullets. And in my mind, I don't have any reason to believe it should be different than that.

And it's because I'm using social media to construct my image of reality. And each of us saw a very different thing. So I was in Hawaii a few months ago, and I met a bunch of people who, because they're in Hawaii, there really isn't been much COVID. And so people who knew me and knew my work actually came up to me and said, oh, you know, it's so interesting watching the social dilemma and these rabbit holes people get into because, you know, over here, we're just so aware that, you know, the shamemic, this whole like, the pandemic hasn't really happened. There's no COVID. And George Floyd was an actor, right? And that's literally what they told me. They thought George Floyd was an actor and they thought the pandemic hadn't actually happened. And this is a really nice, sweet person that I met in Hawaii. So, you know, these are the kinds of things that when you roll back the tape for the last 10 years and say, how do we get to this insanity that we're currently living into? I think people need to see the degree to which social media has been a primary driver of the distortions and the derangement of how we're seeing everything show up. That is terrifying to hear that there's people who, I mean, look, we've all heard sort of extremists

on many sides, but it's scary when you come across one in the wild. Right, because you kind of think like, oh, I thought I was talking to a Russian bot or I thought I was talking to like this one weird sort of basement dweller in rural wherever, not like your aunt thinks of this. And so it gets scary, especially when, and you mentioned this before, Google, Facebook, other algorithm driven companies are putting a billion dollars in resources to try and figure out how they keep us stuck. And it's like playing chess against Gary Kasparov, right? The IBM Deep Blue, it's like 30 moves or whatever, 15 moves ahead. And I'm thinking, oh, I'm just talking Or like a million probably.

Or a million, yeah. Yeah, if they're even, yeah, it's just millions of moves ahead. And I'm going down the little rat maze that it's building for me. And I'm thinking, I have free will and agency and I'm making my own choices. Because the computer that's giving me the choices is so far away from me. I literally can't even see it. It's an information warfare space, so to speak, that is so vast. I can't see the edges.

So I don't even think that I'm inside the maze. Well, I think in any situation, part of ethics is an ethics of symmetry. You know, what makes an interaction between two parties, let's say a used car salesman who knows the car they're selling you as a lemon and then you're the buyer and you don't know that it's a lemon, well, what makes that interaction unethical is an asymmetry of knowledge between how one party knows some information, the other party doesn't know. And they're participating in a transaction, believing that there's a fair knowledge of what's happening. When someone's sitting there using Facebook and they're about to scroll their finger, right, and they think, okay, I'm going to scroll one more time and

that I'm done. And they think that Facebook is just this neutral thing that shows them their friends' birthdays and some photos and some posts that their friends do. And that Facebook doesn't have any ability to manipulate them. Facebook is like the used car salesman. It has all this asymmetric knowledge, not just about that the car is a lemon, but more like they know everything about your psychological weaknesses that you don't even know about yourself. And it can quickly predict the things that would work on you even beyond your knowledge. Because again, it's just seen, and it's funny. I was watching, have you ever seen this film The Edge of Tomorrow? It's with Tom Cruise. No, I feel, well, I don't know. Now I don't know. Those things all blur together, but I've heard of

that for sure. Maybe it's too niche of a film to mention here, but basically it's about an alien species that keeps playing out history. And so it basically, before you're, the reason it keeps winning the war against the humans is that it basically plays out every version of what happens. Right. And it knows what you're going to do before you're going to do it. So in a war, where one party knows what you're going to do before you're going to do it, who wins in a war? If it can literally make an accurate prediction, let's say 95% of the time of like, I literally know you're going to go left here instead of right. And I've got a gun that's traced on you. Like, who's going to win in that interaction?

Well, instead of a gun and like which way you're going to go left or right, it's like there is your prefrontal cortex, your brain's like executive control function. And you think you're only going to watch one more video. And you think that you're going to make a free choice to stop watching the video one minute and 36 seconds in. But literally the computer can predict that you're going to stop watching a one minute, 36 seconds in. and it shows you something else at that exact moment. And so when you realize the degree of asymmetry of knowledge between what the machine knows about us versus what we know about ourselves,

I think there's a grand humility that's required about we as a species have developed a technology to reverse engineer our own free will. And this is such a deep point that I think it's so hard for people to accept because even using this computer with you right now and we're using a podcasting app and I'm just sitting here in a Chrome browser and my desktop is sitting there calmly in the background.

I don't feel like I'm being manipulated. in this moment now with just this podcast app open, I'm not being manipulated. But if I had TikTok open on my phone and I watched one video and I said, oh, that's kind of funny. And I'll scroll the next one. I really do experience myself as having agency. And you and I were talking about hypnosis before maybe we started recording. And in hypnosis, one of the things you're doing is you're playing with people's feeling of their own choice, their own sense of from a, I'm doing something to something is happening to me. And I think that, you know, a metaphor for that is like if you're ever, if ever been going into a building and you open the door, you put your hand on the door handle and you squeeze in

the door handle and then you start pulling it towards you. You're convinced that you're the one pulling the door towards you. But at that very moment, someone else was actually opening the door as well. And they were pushing the door outwards towards you. So there's this weird thing going on because it's kind of an intersection. I'm both pulling the door towards me, but someone else was opening the door towards me at the same time. And if I wasn't really paying attention, in a certain sense, they could have been doing most of the work in that interaction. And I would have the experience that I was doing it when really they were doing it. And I think there's that kind of like blurring of the lines of agency. Who's really the author of the choice when Facebook's

designing the moment-to-moment menu? And when I say Facebook, I mean find and replace that with TikTok, Instagram, et cetera. Sure. Defining the menu of those moment-to-moment experiences. You're listening to The Jordan Harbinger show with our guest, Tristan Harris. We'll be right back. Now back to Tristan Harris on the Jordan Harbinger Show. It seems like technology incentives are just misaligned with the public good. And one of the major sort of takeaways from the last couple of years is that one of the major reasons that our country is so fragmented is that people can't seem to agree on anything, including basic facts or reality, because in part of the staggering amount of disinformation

being crammed down our throats on social media, but also this is in part because technology incentives are not aligned properly with the public good. We're all competing for finite resources like attention. I do it by having interesting people on this show. Others do it by generating fear. And I think you mentioned that earlier at the top of the show, that others do it by making sure that you see something that terrifies you at the exact moment

that they know they're going to lose your attention. So social media does a fear and the outrage thing, but using AI at a massive, massive scale, and then doing it with the Edge of Tomorrow style with like a billion data points on people that behave just like you or just like me, it's an asymmetry that we can't really fight against because we don't even necessarily know

we're in the battle to begin with. Yeah, and to your point, because I think many of us can get caught in the edge of tomorrow infinite loop. Instead of infinitely scrolling Facebook, we can get into the infinite loop of infinitely admiring of the problem, so we get trapped in kind of dystopia, where, as you said, so long as the incentives of these dominant technology companies that make up the center of our information ecosystem for most people living in a country, you can't have, you know, the dominant information systems operating on a business model that says, let me just give you the next thing

based on what will be most likely to keep your attention, because that will just select for that which deranges your society. It selects for the things that are more addicting. It selects for things that are more distracting, polarizing, validation seeking. So we say, so long as a human being is worth more as the product than as a customer, then we are worth more when we are addicted, outraged, polarized, anxious, misinformed, validation-seeking, and not knowing what's true, because each of those phrases, addiction, distraction, narcissistic, polarized, misinformed, are success cases of a business model that was trying to get your attention. And we don't want a world where, like, the worst version of ourselves is the thing that's profitable,

especially in a geopolitical competition with China. Because if I'm China, and I'm noticing, okay, I'm a digital authoritarian country that's consciously using all the technologies to make a stronger, more effective digital authoritarian society. And it's well-run and it has different values than our society has. But we can notice that digital open societies like the U.S. are not saying, hey, let's consciously use all the tech to make stronger, healthier, better open societies that work better together. Instead, we've allowed market process between three or four major tech companies to profit from the degradation of our democratic capacity. So now you play those two games.

Game theoretic actors. Instead of Gary Kasparov and the AI, let's play the U.S. and China against each other in a world where one has tech that basically operates the brain implant of its entire society in a way that dumbs it down, makes it addicted, distracted, polarized, narcissistic, misinformed. And in the other society that basically is consciously using tech to make it expand its economy, be more effective, consciously use AI, et cetera. Like, we just have to do something different.

I think that's what we have to get to is let's not just say, let's fix social media, be slightly less bad to have to take a few more whack-a-mole sticks, to whack a few more pieces of misinformation and call it a day because now social media is like 5% less toxic. That's like the head of sustainability at Exxon saying, hey, we've, you know, increased our rate of clean oil extraction by 5%. We only spill half the amount of oil in the ocean now. Yeah. Right, right, exactly.

And by the way, that metaphor is very apt. We often talk about our work at the Center for Humane Technology, which is the organization that I run that operates in the vehicle for our work in this topic in the world. And we talk about this problem is the climate change of culture. So what Exxon is to climate change, I think Facebook is to this climate change of culture, this entire business model. It's an extractive business model that's like the Exxon of human anxiety. It pumps human anxiety and drives a profit from the turning of human beings into predictable

behavior. And predictable behavior means sort of the seven deadly sins, the worst of us as the business model. And so that's the thing we have to change. We have to not just make Exxon slightly less bad. We need things that are like the solar or the Tesla. We need a new thing that makes us a stronger, healthier society that doesn't predate or extract from the worst of us. Yeah, that was something I was going to bring up later is like why can't, and it seems like with more data points we could be able to do this? Like, why is it that the worst stuff is addicting? Like, it seems like we could optimize our devices and even social media to give us the highest possible return that's

actually good for us. You know, don't show me the most outrageous crap that's going to piss me off. Show me the stuff that's going to make me educated, put me up, happy, shape the course of my day by getting me to work out, commute safely, and in a relaxed way, and then pop into the office with a positive attitude. And I'm wondering, do we just not yet have the technology to say, measure how my day went after seeing such and such video or having such and such interaction? Like the Facebook, that Facebook could see when I'm writing an angry comment, but there's no data from my 3D real life coming back to the platform to say like, hey, there are negative consequences to that. But when this guy consumes this, he has a great day. Let's give him more of that, so he has a

great day. So one of the things you're bringing up here is just how much of this entire problem we're talking about is due to an inability to measure when the positive thing could happen as a different outcome. So we can't measure when Facebook accidentally led to you seeing that a friend also happen to be in town and you message them. Actually, this is an example. Frankly, they could. Yeah, I feel like they could do that. There's a positive. That's actually one where they could. In fact, they could probably build a little thing. There'd be a lot of private. There'd be a million privacy concerns about this, but just theoretically speaking, if you just wanted to lay it out. How often does someone see that someone else is visiting town and that that person

sends them a message on Facebook Messenger and says, oh, are you still in town or what dates? Are we should get up? We should meet together. They could actually measure the number of times that happens. Now, that would be a privacy violation, but that would at least be, you can imagine some kind of fiduciary model where there's some protected way in which that kind of scanning could happen. And then you could have Facebook literally measure how often it's leading to face-to-face connection with people who are not even in the same town normally. So they literally know when they are bringing the world face-to-face closer together. I would call that more an example of humane technology in the sense that what we're really after in our lives is to spend

our time, you know, meaningfully and in connection with the things that matter most to us, including when people who we can't see very often who we care about. But a lot of the other things like you're talking about, like when did YouTube lead to genuinely learning about, let's say, game theory and how game theory plays into U.S.-China dynamics or something? You could have watched a video, but was that actually a video that left you with lasting comprehension, or did it just flow right through you and you actually don't know what you watched,

and now you're onto the next video and it's a plane crash, and now you're onto a Q&ON video? Like, mostly we're actually just a sieve, and the stuff is just flowing right through us. So the fact that we don't have a good way to measure, okay, what did genuine learning happen here? Or is genuine connection happening here? Or could Tinder measure, you know, that you met someone and it's like the love of your life?

Well, they can measure that you stop using the app. But the point is they have a lot more signals that we can measure when we keep reinstantiating the problem. Like we can keep measuring when you keep swiping on photos and people or when you send messages to people, we can't really measure when you find the love of your life. we can keep measuring when people click on more videos. We can't keep measuring when that video changed your life course because it inspired you to take a very different bold action. There's an entire like invisible dark corner of YouTube, not really dark, but it's like a light

corner of YouTube that is like all these hopeful and inspiring videos that like pump people up, right? Or videos of life advice or, you know, things that build up people's courage or YouTube could be about creating those moments in our lives if it noticed that we were feeling low self-esteem are kind of not courageous or something, and that's kind of what we're seeking. But to do that, human beings have to know ourselves better as well. There's sort of two parts to this equation. Like, one is, how are we better introspecting on what it is that's really behind us, behind our own internal screen? So what's behind my actions is some deeper set of feelings, anxieties, emotions. And then how does the tech be in conversation not with like our finger,

our rat pellet clicking, you know, Skitterbox part of us, but the deeper part of us? And I think that's in general, like we have the wrong parts of ourselves that are in conversation. It's like when you see your parents fight. It's like we know that those two people love each other, but the wrong parts of themselves are in conversation because they've been triggered into a different part of their identity. Right now, both the AI that's on the screen behind the slab of glass is the wrong part that we want to be in conversation with. And then we're not in the right part of conversation with ourselves.

Yeah, this is interesting. And I think it comes down to in many ways, like the lack of data, as you mentioned before, but also we want the goals of the persuader to be aligned with the goals of the persuadee. and it's just like, it seems sort of hard, well, I don't want to say, I'm trying to avoid saying it's impossible, but it's very, very difficult to sort of reconcile. Before we attack that, a lot of people say, well, why is it different with social media now? I mean, come on, I grew up with television, I grew up with radio. I'm fine.

Society is not great, but it's also not Armageddon. Everyone said the TV is going to cause Armageddon, just like they did with the radio, and it didn't happen. Why is the mobile phone and social media and our devices that are so personal to us so much more dangerous? There's a great new paper. I forgot the institution that put it out. I think it's called stewarding collective human behavior. And it's really about, they actually talk about the need for a new discipline. I think they call it a crisis discipline. It's basically that in the field of engineering are building a bridge, we know what a bridge that an engineer built that broke down and crashed and collapsed or something like that. That's a very clear engineering failure mode.

What does it mean to fail to rewire three billion people's attention and information flows and relationships in a way that doesn't quote unquote collapse. Like when a bridge collapses, viscerally, our human sensory input is evolutionary evolved to recognize that as like a failure. But technology that rewires three billion people's literally like your brain at a fundamental neurophysiological level, your attentional level, your relational level, which relationships are top of mind, your choice making and your sense making, your information.

Like there's never been something that rewires the entire. civilizational brain. So like TV did change social relationships. It did change attention. It is a pretty profound thing, but it didn't do it in this hyper-personalized, micro-targeted exponential tech backed by AI predicting your weaknesses deeper than you know your own weaknesses. Didn't do any of those things. And it didn't fundamentally redefine your social relationship. So with kids, for example, there's this great actually kind of really horrible and sad and depressing survey of what kids aspired. So not great. To be clear, the opposite of great. Not great. What I mean in the sense of it's a really important and insightful survey that was done about what do kids most inspire to be?

And I think if you asked them like 20 years ago, he used to be scientist, engineer, doctor, lawyer, things like that. They ask kids, so what do you most aspire to be? And the number one result today is an influencer. It's to be an Instagram influencer or a TikTok influence. I think they did the same survey in China and the number one result was astronaut and Dr. Lawyer, a scientist engineer. Just right there, which society has any say in the future? The one who everyone wants to be an influencer and he won, okay, so that's just one little note. Second note, is this happening by accident?

Like, is this just the natural trend of things? Like, maybe this is just what kids want. I mean, we should respect what they want. Well, TikTok and Instagram both have programs to actively cultivate the influencer lifestyle and make that as attractive as possible because, if I'm TikTok, a society filled with narcissism seeking, validation seeking influencers, is a way more profitable society. It's a way more profitable form of young kid than a kid who's not interested in being an influencer. So fundamentally, it's in TikTok's interest to create an

influencer society. What Gidea board, the French theorist wrote a book in the 1960s, I think called the Society of the Spectacle, in which the spectacle, the performant, the human performance is a more profitable kind of society than a society that is authentic in some way. So we have inauthenticity and alienation being a more profitable way that society could be organized than an authentic society. And that has all sorts of downstream effects, let alone the fact that it screws up children at a very deep level. So when we get to your question of what is different or so apocalyptic this time, I think it's pretty easy to see that a society in which it's more profitable for each person to be addicted, narcissistic, distracted,

confused about reality, not knowing what's true. That is not a society that can solve its problem. That is not a society that can solve climate change. That is not a society that can escape pandemics or agree on anything. And that is incompatible with the future that we want to live in. So we know already that we can't really live with these being the business models that guide the way our society works. We can have a more humane symbiotic relationship between technology in a democracy, like what Taiwan is doing or like what Estonia has done, what Wikipedia is as a good example. There are ways technology can be positively in symbiosis with humanity, but it has to be done

with different business models. I think that's one of the key things that people don't understand about the social dilemma or they think that this is about, which is, this is not about being an anti-technology society. In fact, if I was China, I would want this to be heard as an anti-technology society because that would mean you're going to be left in the Stone Age while I basically consciously like accelerate all my tech efforts and I keep becoming a better and better digital society. So what we really want is a new third attractor, which is I'm borrowing language from a mentor

of mine, Daniel Schmachtenberger, who we're interviewing on our podcast, which is we need to have a new third attractor, which is not digital authoritarianism, which is a digital closed society. We don't want a open chaotic society based on tech that downgrades humans. We need a third thing, which is a society that is consciously using tech to make a stronger, healthier, better, 21st century open society. And we either do that or we call the American experiment over, I think. Yeah, it's scary and it sounds sort of apocalyptic, but I understand. I mean, it seems like the economy has shifted from spend time doing things or consuming things that are delivering the best returns, like working out, like you mentioned,

reading, hiking, even meditation apps or whatever, to spend time doing the most useless shit that exists online. So clickbait articles, watching viral crap on YouTube, that auto loads from the sidebar while I'm stuffing flaming hot Cheetos into my face hole. Why is it that only the junk food version of online consumption seems to be addictive and exploding in terms of the level of consumption? And how does this asymmetry radicalize and polarize us instead of just keeping us stuck to Farmville? Like I remember when everybody was addicted to Farmville and people were like, oh, this is

terrible. And I'm like, whatever, kids play with their grandma. It's fine. Now it's like, oh, we could destroy democracy. I mean, that seems even more, it's obviously just more dangerous. and it seems to have happened somewhat recently as well. Isn't it still profitable for them to just have us mining fake cucumbers on Farmville?

Why has it become so dangerous, like really dangerous? Well, I think to your question of what's different this time, and you mentioned the example of Farmville, as bad as an addictive and manipulative as Farmville was, and I have friends who used to work at Zinka on Farmville, and they knew how bad it was, and they feel bad about it now, and a lot of those people are trying to reform their ways,

again, in a different way. But Farmville was a game that was, I think it was the most popular game on Facebook for a very long time. But again, it was a game that existed as a game exists in someone's life. It's like a tiny part of your life or it can become a bigger part of your life. But it's a game fits into a place in your life. Social media that becomes the fabric of what it means to participate in a pandemic world where you're basically stuck at home.

Like people live their lives on Twitter now. Like researchers share their knowledge on Twitter. Business runs on Facebook and Instagram, et cetera. You use Facebook ads to basically do your primary customer demand building. If you're a politician, most of your communication is going to be happening through social media. So what's key is that it would be really bad if Farmville became a more and more dominant place, people spend their time if it was, you know, addicting people and bankrupting them. And it did do some of those things.

And that's bad. But it wasn't this sort of taking over the fundamental brain implant of what it meant to be you. And I think that these social media platforms have taken over the brain implant of what it means to be, the person that you are, and also the society that we are. I mean, if you think about it, our society is less in the physical world now than it has ever been. So most of what's occurring or makes up the U.S. economy, for example, is increasingly occurring in a digitally mediated space. Like we find out about products online. We buy them from online stores. We communicate online. National security is an online phenomenon. We can tell now with cyber attacks and things like that.

So most of what makes up, whether it's national security, the economy, kids' education, How much does physical kids' education matter compared to the eight hours a day that your kids spend on TikTok? Like, which one's going to influence them more? Me praying on cyberbullying that occurs during an eight-hour footprint in a kid's life or, you know, the five hours that the kid spends at school

barreling and paying attention to their teacher. So the point here is the primacy of the digital world over the physical world and the sort of debasing of the substrate of the physical world that undergirds that digital world. I think that's a trend that we have to be very watchful of. This is the Jordan Harbinger show with our guest Tristan Harris.

We'll be right right back. Thank you so much for listening to and supporting this show. These episodes are a pleasure to make. They do cost us a little bit. And I don't ask for anything. Well, I shouldn't say anything. I don't ask for much. Please do consider supporting those who support us.

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and don't forget, we've got worksheets for many of these episodes. If you want some of the drills and exercise talked about during the show, those are also in one easy place. That link is in the show notes at Jordan Harbinger.com slash podcast. Now for the conclusion of my conversation with Tristan Harris. For me, it also seems like some of the most brilliant people on the planet, right? Google, for example, as engineers living in our rental unit from Belarus and Serbia. You know, these people are recruited not to come to California to cure cancer,

figure out how to create green energy, but they're here to figure out in large part as a group, not as individuals, of course, but how to game the human attention span. So it seems like a huge waste of human capital and potential in many ways. And to be fair, I realize Google does more than sell me ads, but they're really focused on monetizing our eyeballs, hacking our brains, and Google is by no means alone in doing this, so I don't mean to just pick on them. But it's not even just ignoring huge issues like climate change and responding to a global pandemic, but now they're actually making it more difficult for us as a nation or as a species to respond to these challenges facing all of humanity. So it's bad enough to neglect the issues, but now to sort of

step in between of, even by accident, and obstruct the problem and the solution, it's just so much worse. And I think the premise of digging into this apocalyptic terrain that we're doing together, I think is no one wants to live in this reality. No one does. You don't, I don't, your kids don't, politicians don't. It's a road to nowhere. So the premise is that I think tech workers also don't want to live in this reality, which is to say that we're all in the same team. We just don't know it yet. Because right now, imagine if instead of going to work, and like you said, the smartest people in Silicon Valley are essentially focused on PhDs, focused on reverse engineering the human nervous system and getting psychological weaknesses to get hijacked.

Once we, you know, there was a narrative that stood that up for a while that said, like, we are making the world more positively open connected and enabling search and doing all these things and broadcast yourself, YouTube, Instagram, life, et cetera, what we're seeing through now is the veneer and realizing that entire construct is just not good. And we've changed the social norms. I think people who saw the social dilemma, one of the things that changed is that grandparents who used to say,

oh, I'm so proud my kid works at Facebook. They work on the business analytics team. That's now not a cool thing to say. So I think we've changed the social status-making and social norm-making fabric that now we all realize this is not the thing that we want. which means that I think tech workers actually want to go to work thinking, wow, I work at a tech company and here's what I'm doing to accelerate human progress on climate change.

Wouldn't that be an inspiring thing if I'm coming to work? And I know that every day my actions are actually about helping humanity at a global level that only tech can reach 3 billion people at the same time and actually offer ways for us to globally coordinate in positive, non-rivalrous and cooperative ways. But I can imagine that would be an exciting way to go to work. We don't want to be an anti-tech society. We want to be a tech society that is helping us solve our problems, that is helping us find common ground, that's helping us get longer attention spans. That's actually deepening the development of children and offering space for these other parts of our lives that don't get as much attention.

Technology can do all those things. And by the way, the whole premise here is that that's the goal of all this. It's not to drown in the sort of yelling about the problem from our basements. It's to say that we can actually have both regulation and a technology environment and venture capitalists that are funding human beings. technology that's actually finding that symbiosis between that uplifted, elevated versions, elevated angels of our nature, and having that be the thing that's as profitable as possible. So how do we change the business model? I mean, it seems like regulation, I hate that, that's a default solution. So I'm looking for something else if you've got it. It kind of,

it sort of reminds me about, remember when the NFL found out that concussions were causing people to have all these health problems and the players were having all these problems later on life? It's like they've realized that smashing heads together causes all these issues. And then they kind of like one second later realized that the smashing of heads together is integral to their business model. And they're like, how do we avoid smashing heads? We don't. So now we need to hide the problem.

It seems like that's where we are with tech companies. On the other hand, you are a design ethicist or you were a design ethicist at Google. So the fact that that role even existed is kind of somewhat heartening, right? Like that's maybe good news at some level that they hire. someone to even think about these problems? I think what you're getting at is the recognition of how we profit from the problem currently. Problems that we obviously want to go away are directly tied into, like you're saying with the football and concussions example, the business model of football is selling concussions

on TV against advertising. Once we discover that, we can't just immediately drop the concussions part of the DNA of the sport. It's just too baked into the sport. That's true of football, but there are different. ways of designing technology. Apple could radically change overnight next year the way that our phones work and are incentivized. What I mean by that is instead of having an app store, where apps are competing for downloads, for use, for payments, engagement, et cetera, they can say we're actually

getting rid of apps. And instead, we're actually offering these things called helpers. And helpers are basically things that are competing to help us improve our lives in different ways. What I mean by that is, like right now a meditation app is like sitting in an app store along with every other thing that's an app that's trying to steal your attention. So it's fighting against the wrong kinds of things. It's like broccoli that's competing against like every kind of industrial agriculture, like salt sugar, fat, maximizing thing. You wouldn't put broccoli right next to those things because it would just lose in that choice architecture. But if we sort of invent that kind of Whole Foods reorientation, where the whole store becomes about what would make us healthy

and have the whole store be about that, I mean, I know Whole Foods isn't perfect, but that's kind of the direction that we would need to head. Apple could be changing the way that notifications work, the way that home screens work. I mean, they're doing this already by enabling their new version of their OS. They're actually taking an idea from a TED Talk I gave in 2013 of bidirectional, do not disturb. So it's making it easier and making suggestions about when could we say, hey, I want to basically not be bothered right now or take a break from my phone right now and have it

automatically signal that to other people. So now when you try to message me, it'll say, oh, by the way, before you hit sending this message, you should know that Tristan is like away and at work right now or something like that. So now it creates social signaling, not just that I'm like doing, do not to serve what we've been able to do for many years, but it creates social signaling and new social norms. And technology could be instrumenting culture in that way, in a more humane way that's making more room for these boundaries, for how do we want to live our lives? On the democracy front and sense making and information front, that's a harder challenge.

I think we need to look to examples like Taiwan. I would really encourage that your listeners listen to, we did a great interview on our podcast called Your UnDivided Attention, the name of our podcast, with a digital minister of Taiwan, Audrey Tang, who basically strengthened democracy, used tech plus democracy to make a stronger democracy. And she, you know, has just a thousand examples. And this is against the threat of Chinese disinformation. I mean, Taiwan is basically the first target of China's sort of growth, a next phase of its development. And so even under the threat of China's sort of constant disinformation engine and machine, how does Taiwan use technology to make a stronger democracy? Right now in the West, I think we have a vision gap. We think tech plus democracy equals like, oh, we've seen that experiment. It's horrible. It's led to this horrible world. We saw the social dilemma. That's not the world we want to live in. I think we have a huge vision gap. If we don't believe that there is a future other than the one that we're heading towards, then that's also a problem.

We'll sort of soak ourselves in despair. And that's why I think it's so important people immerse themselves in examples of this can work, right? So typically, if you talk about Silicon Valley and you go to other places around the world, you go to Honduras, you go to Nigeria or something like that, and people say, wow, that's amazing that Silicon Valley works that way. But we could never do that, you know, in Nigeria or Honduras. But with this Taiwan example, when you hear about it, and if you listen to the episode, what's funny, I think people say, that's amazing, but we can never do what Taiwan's doing

in Silicon Valley. And it's like, well, hold on a second. We should be able to say we can do these things. but we have to be willing to imagine a different kind of future, and imagine we can escape these bad business models. I want to be respectful of your time. Are you optimistic about our ability to resist this? You seem to be, which is great,

but it's really easy nowadays to say, we're screwed, no one's ever going to get a rain on these tech companies, they're never going to be aligned with us, we're going to turn into human behavior batteries that just program their AI and then die a slow painful death, right? But you seem to, at least so far, be pretty optimistic that people are figuring this out, you're figuring this out, Taiwan's figuring this out, we can figure this out as a nation or as a society, and we can put this tech to work for us,

and then in 50 years we'll be looking back at, man, remember when we let that whole thing get wildly out of control? Yeah, that was when I was in college. What a cluster fuck that was. Now look at it. You know, it seems like you're sort of thinking that that's where we're headed. I'm very pragmatic, and I think that people are right to feel the level of doubt or skepticism that they feel. I felt that for eight years have been working nonstop on just this one topic. I wish we had other things we could work on in our lives. But I have to say also, I've never seen more momentum than I've seen in the last two, three years, especially. You know, we live in a world where the social dilemma has been seen by more than 100 million people in 190 countries and 30 languages.

I heard that the social dilemma is required viewing in parts of the Pentagon. You know, I think we live in a world where U.S. and China, great power competition dynamics are getting great. clearer and clearer to people. And it's very clear that you can't have a West that out-competees China if the West is basically allowing technology to make democracies totally dysfunctional against an opponent who's using technology to make a stronger, more effective autocracy. So I think that we see regulators that are taking steps up. We see attorney generals that are making public statements. We see the co-founder of Facebook, Chris Hughes, who I met years before he had kind of changed his opinion. You know, writing a public op-ed in the New York Times saying it's time to

break up Facebook. I've seen more progress and more momentum on these issues in the last few years, which I don't want listeners of your show to believe is reason for them just take a step back and say, I'm so glad this is handled. It's going to heal itself on its own. Right. All said. It's not going to heal itself on its own. Yeah. Yeah. We need every single one of us to be talking about these issues, to be referring our friends who don't believe this to see things like the social dilemma or another film is Childhood 2.0 comparing the childhoods of children now to children who were, you know, 40-year-olds who are talking about their childhoods to 90-year-olds who are talking about their childhoods and doing that compare contrast.

Wait, is that a documentary? Yeah, Childhood 2.0 is a documentary, yeah. Is it on Netflix? Where is it? It's actually on YouTube, I believe. Oh, okay. Childhood. We're going to link to that in the show notes,

but I'm going to watch it tonight. And for educators out there, I believe they just made the social dilemma available to educators for free, and you can actually just register for an educator link. And so anybody who knows people at schools or, you know, we've seen that the social dilemma already has been required viewing at most high schools that, you know, we've heard of and we've got LA Unified School District who's doing various experiments and trials

with, you know, 600,000 students. There's just so many things that are happening. And obviously, we all wish it was going about a thousand times faster. But I just want to say that I think that more people are realizing that the current road that we're walking is not sustainable and something very dramatic needs to change. We need to get there faster. So we need everyone's help to be, you know, speaking about these issues is the top of their lungs. And it's going to take a miracle, but something unprecedented has happened before in our history, whether it's things like the Manhattan Project or Civil Rights Movement or a favorite book of mine is the book Burry the Chains, which is about the British Empire's abandoning of slavery and how it took 100 years. And advocacy with the Quakers and these

networks of people who exposed these cruel ways of treating other human beings over and over again. And we eventually did something that felt impossible. And obviously, we still live with the legacies of all that today. But studying the history of unprecedented human social change is a really important discipline that I certainly wish I was spending more time on because I think that's where we are. We're looking for the kind of changes that are unprecedented and dramatic, but thoughtful in terms of what we have to address. Christan, thank you so much, man. Really appreciate your time and your expertise. The movie's great. We'll link to that in the show notes for people who haven't seen the social dilemma. But thank you for your work. I think you know

it's important, but I think now you're right. People are starting to wake up to the fact that like, hey, the stuff I see on the news is not necessarily real. The stuff I see in the social media is designed to piss me off and keep me engaged. And maybe this is bad for our society. I think even the sort of slowest technophobic people who are still on social media are finally now starting to realize this. And as a parent, I think, it's up to us to make sure that our kids don't inherit this particular dysfunction of our society. So thank you once again. Thanks so much, Jordan. And I think that on that thing you just mentioned about being a parent, one of the things that's been most inspiring to me is there's been from very high level and influential

folks who it was their children who saw the social dilemma and sent it to their parents who are these influential policymakers and others. The number of times I hear that story makes me more hopeful that also the next generation is tuning in to some of these things. I'm right there with you. So thank you so much for having me. I've got some thoughts on this episode. But before I get into that, I wanted to give you a preview of my conversation with the legendary Dennis Quaid. We got into rejection both in Hollywood and outside and how he brings his characters to life on screen. This is really a fun episode. I think you're going to dig it. I didn't know at the time if I wanted to be an actor. That was back during the time where I wanted

to be a veterinarian or a forest ranger. Forest ranger. You'd be fighting fires right now. Yes, I would. I'm evacuated from my house right now. Are you really? I saw the smoke when I flew in this morning. And our flight originally was canceled and I was like, you got to give me to LA. I got Dennis Quaid coming here. I can't stand him up for this bullshit fire. You use a lot of different accents in many of your films. I'm curious how you learn and practice those. My brother and I grew up doing impersonations like Ed Sullivan and John Wayne and, you know, everybody that was around us. So I big up on accents badly even. You know, like in India, I would be talking. Oh, man. Are you the guy that hears one on TV and

then spends the rest of the week annoying everybody in the house? I prepared a secret. So, like, you're in the shower going, one more gin, one more, gin. I can't get her to cool captain. That one's awesome. That's definitely good.

There's a reason you get paid the big bucks for these, and I don't, that's for sure. I know music's a big part of your life. You wrote a few songs for three of your films. Been in a band for like 20 years? Same guys. Same guys. For 19 years this Halloween.

Oh, happy band-aversary. Well, that's really good. You can steal that. I definitely think I just made that up just now. Really? Yeah. I've never heard you. I've also never heard.

Wow, it just came out. Yeah. See what happens when you relax. Is it true that you play with your band in Bear Feast? Yes, when we first started out. The Beast Boys, they don't wear shirts. I won't wear shoes. For more with Dennis Quaid, including how he uses fear to stay motivated,

check out episode 279 right here on the Jordan Harbinger show. This was a really interesting episode, as is the social. Lema, the documentary on Netflix. You should definitely check that out if you haven't yet. I assume that Tristan has scared off a lot of prospective employers. I like, imagine, does Snapchat want to hire a guy who's shouting from the rooftops about how social media is bad for us? I don't know. The algorithm we've noticed, right, gets more extreme with what it shows. When you go down those YouTube rabbit holes, right, it's kind of like action movies have bigger and bigger explosions and crazier fights until the final showdown because that's what keeps our attention, right?

It just keeps one-upping us. So we search for info. on the war in Afghanistan, and we end up with a Holocaust denial video after like eight steps or sometimes even less. Jerome Lanier talked a lot about this on our show ages ago. That's episode 156. He talked about the filter bubble, how that's constructed, and what we can do about it. So that's another recommendation there for you. Right now, it seems like Facebook is the runaway AI, right?

This hypothetical machine that we build, where we tell this AI to make paper clips, and it does so until it turns the entire planet and all of the people in it into paper clips. They're just grinding our bones for paper clips. There's no humans anymore, right? This AI has just ground every resource into paper clips. Facebook, social media, this is starting to look a little bit like the runaway AI. And misinformation will only get worse until we do something. Deepfakes come to mind, right? Those videos that you see online where it's Tom Cruise showing you a magic trick, except it's totally not him. We talked about deep fakes in depth with Nina Schick, Episode 486 is where that is.

That is a new frontier that is just some terrifying media. You won't be able to believe what you hear. You won't be able to believe what you see. Do we just eventually realize that our own eyes, our own ears, and our own minds are no longer adequate for making sense of the world? That is terrifying. I'd love to know that heads of state

and heads of our defense and intelligence services are just clued into this, and glued onto this, hopefully, and ideally asking how this might be combated in some form. Further, conspiracy thinking is fueled by a lot, and once people believe in one conspiracy theory, it opens up the floodgates to so much more. Kids are coming into schools arguing that the earth is flat or that the Holocaust didn't happen. This is super dangerous.

It is so dangerous to see our kids being diseducated at such a young age. It's very hard to undo that kind of damage. China and Russia are using these services. These services that we use right here in the United States, the ones they ban in their own country, they're using these services to target the divisions within our country. We talked about this with Renee DeResta as well, episode 420. We do a full breakdown of this. So as you can see, I've been around this topic and adjacent to this topic for a long time now.

And if you think it's bad in the United States, Facebook, for example, just as an example, they are no more or less guilty than anyone else. They don't have content moderators in the hundreds of dialects in all of the countries on earth. Yes, we have it in English. That's the most developed part of the platform when it comes to moderators. And that moderation, by all accounts, is pretty crappy. So just imagine what it's like in Ethiopia, which is a hotbed right now and very at risk for civil conflict. What's the moderation like there, especially in some of those rural tribal languages? It's non-existent. And yet those platforms can be

used to sow division and start armed and violent conflict between the peoples who live in that region. The deprogramming, it sounds a lot like the cult deprogramming that I talked about at length with Stephen Hassan, who's been on the show several times, episodes 238 and 4. The cult deprogramming stuff is no joke. Just remember, if we're addicted to likes, we're more valuable. If we're insecure and checking incessantly on engagement, we're more valuable. If we're rage tweeting or commenting on something 40 times because we're in an insane argument with a stranger on the internet on a platform, we are more valuable.

The worst aspects of us, our base instincts as humans, are more valuable and more profitable to these platforms. So it behooves these platforms to literally program us to do all of these things at the expense of our sanity and our mental health. Furthermore, this is a tech arms race, right? If one platform does sketchy stuff with notifications or the algorithm or the feed, then everyone else has to follow suit or they'll lose those impressions and that time on site to competitors, which is of course untenable in business. So it becomes a race to the bottom. Contrast this with other tools that we use. Other tools that don't have an agenda of what they want from me. Microsoft Word doesn't have an agenda. My squat rack doesn't have an agenda. Social media has an

agenda. So stop following outrage media. That means a lot of those lefty, righty sides that get you all worked up, just unfollow. Those influencers that post nonsense stuff to get you alarmed, unfollow. And if you don't believe me, you want to see how this looks, how this is all tailored to you to get a rise out of you? Watch YouTube or look at Facebook on somebody else's phone. See how their reality looks compared to yours. I guarantee you it won't be nearly as interesting to you personally. Try it. You'll be amazed at how tailored these things are to you. It knows what gets a rise out of you and what keeps you sucked in and they will lean into that without mercy. Again, I highly recommend watching Tristan's documentary The Social Dilemma. It's available on Netflix. Also,

speaking of YouTube, you can watch Childhood 2.0 on YouTube. also has Tristan in it. Very interesting. It shows different generations of people and what their childhood was like. And I'll leave it to you to see exactly how our current generation of kids is dealing with this influx of social media compared to the older generations. And last but not least, check out the Center for Humane Technologies podcast, Your Undivided Attention, starring the one and only Tristan Harris. And of course, thank you to Tristan. Links to all of his stuff, all the stuff I mentioned as well in the show notes. Please use our website links. If you buy books from any guests, report the show. Worksheets for episodes are in the show notes. Transcripts are in the show notes.

Videos of interviews on our YouTube channel at Jordan Harbinger.com slash YouTube. You can go watch a video of this and then eight steps later. You can be watching a video of why Mao's great leap forward never happened and why Taiwan is a part of China. And if you don't agree, then you're racist somehow. And also how the Holocaust didn't happen. That's what you get. Hopefully you can just stick to our channel. None of that nonsense there. We also have a brand new clips channel. cuts that didn't make it to the show, highlights from the interviews you just can't see anywhere else. Jordan Harbinger.com slash clips is where you can find that. I'm at Jordan Harbinger on both Twitter and Instagram. You can also hit me on LinkedIn. I always enjoy interacting with y'all

online. And of course, I'm teaching you how to connect with other great people and manage relationships using the same system, software, and tiny habits that I use. That's our six-minute networking course, which is free over at Jordan Harbinger.com slash course. Dig that well before you get Thursday. Most of the guests on the show subscribe to the course. Come join us. You'll be in smart company where you belong. This show is created in association with podcast one. My team is Jen Harbinger, J. Sanderson, Robert Fogarty, Millie Ocampo, Ian Baird, Josh Ballard, and Gabriel Mizrahi. Remember, we rise by lifting others. The fee for this show is that you share it with friends and you find something useful or interesting. If you know somebody who is ringing the bell

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